AMD Turion ii ultra dual-core m600 processor review

The Turion ii M600 is a dual core processor from Advanced Micro Devices which has a nominal core frequency of 2400 MHz. Manufactured with 45 nm technology the Turion ii M600 has a TDP rating of mid range 35 Watts suitable for medium and large size notebooks.

The performance of the Turion ii processors should be close to the Intel Core 2 processors in the nominal clock frequency of 2.0 to 2.2 GHz. In other words, the similarly clocked Intel core 2 processor slightly outperforms the AMD Turion ii Ultra processor M600.

The Turion ii Ultra M600 has, however, integrated memory controller, which leads to lower memory latency and a better overall performance. The integrated memory controller in the Turion ii M600 is a dual channel DDR2-400.

The communication with the chipset is using HyperTransport Bus at 3600 MT/s. Although many websites including AMD’s own website at

mentions the front side bus as 3600 MHz, we at starredreviews, believe that they meant 3600 Million Transaction per second. Dirk Meyer, are you listening ?

It may have been more appropriate to call it either 1800 MHz or 3600 Mt/s. The confusion is created, since, the HyperTransport Bus works on the rising as well as falling edge of the clock. So even though the clock frequency is 1800 MHz the effective rate of the transfer of bits is 3600 MT/s.

The Turion ii M600 has a 1 MB of L2 Cache in each of the two cores, making up a total of 2 MB L2 cache. This core is not a shared core, unlike the intel smart cache in its core i3 and i5 processors. The dedicated core, however, simplifies the design and keeps the things clean, and potentially reduces the overhead in latency. The discussion of the dedicated Vs shared cache is beyond the scope of this review. In some test environment, the shared cache definitely has a point, especially if a particular application, for example, need a larger cache.

According to AMD –

Each core has its own dedicated L2 cache, which enables simultaneous independent core access to cache, eliminating the need for cores to arbitrate for cache access. This helps reduce latency on L2 cache access.

The Turion ii M600 supports the various multimedia instructions including the latest SSE3, Enhanced 3DNow!. It also supports the AMD64 – the 64 bit instruction set from AMD.

The AMD Virtualization support should help your system if you are planning to use two operating systems and you need to switch between the operating systems seamlessly.

The Super Pi 1M and 2M benchmark scores for the Turion ii M600 processor is 32 seconds and 75 seconds respectively. The 3DMark score, a benchmark score for the graphics intensive task has been reported to be close to 1900.